


we have not touched the stars

by minamoto (ewidentnie)



Category: Green Lantern (Comics)
Genre: Canonical Character Death, F/M, Minor Character(s), community: dcu_bang, mostly canon-compliant, the other girlfriend, very brief attempted non-con
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-10-29
Updated: 2012-10-29
Packaged: 2017-11-17 08:12:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Major Character Death, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 10,108
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/549450
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ewidentnie/pseuds/minamoto
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>Jillian Pearlman of Earth. You have the ability to overcome great fear.</i>
</p><p> </p><p>She's been called plenty of things in her life - Jill, Jilly, Pearlman, Captain, Cowgirl - but Green Lantern is certainly a new one. Jillian Pearlman, from when she first knew she wanted to fly, to when she earns her wings as Earth's newest Green Lantern.</p>
            </blockquote>





	we have not touched the stars

**Author's Note:**

> My entry for this year's dcu_bang!
> 
> I was lucky enough to work with the absolutely _amazing_ Arkillian - you can see her work [here](http://arkilliandragon.tumblr.com/post/34473536211/the-fate-of-hal-jordan-an-exchange-picture-done) \- everyone should totally go tell her how lovely it is because man it is _great_!
> 
> Enjoy, guys :D

**0**. _Jillian Pearlman of Earth. You have the ability to overcome great fear._

 

 

 **1**. Jillian has been called many things - they aren’t all things she has chosen for herself, and some days she thinks it’s kind of unfair that she never had the chance to. She looked up her first name, in one of the big books they have in the library, once, and one definition says it means youthful and another says it means ‘God’s child’ and she isn’t sure if she likes either of these definitions; thinks maybe she’ll just make up her own some day.

Her parents never bothered giving their kids a middle name, didn’t see the point, and she never thinks anything weird about this until she starts school and all the other girls are telling each other theirs like it’s some kind of special secret. _And you, Jilly?_ they ask, but she just tells them she doesn’t have one and they look at her oddly and then turn away.

When she asks, her mother tells her that _you, Jillian Pearlman, are special enough that you don’t need another name to tell everyone who you are_ , and it makes more than enough sense in her head when she thinks about it. She decides that she doesn’t even like the nickname Jilly anyway and never speaks to those girls again.

 

 

She is fourteen when she first goes up in a plane; not a commercial jet that smells like sanitized air, but a _real_ one where you can feel every turn and dive, where you have to wear headphones just to hear yourself speak over the rush of wind and the sound of the engine. She sits in the co-pilot’s seat, and her uncle lets her fly for a few minutes at a time. Her turns aren’t coordinated at all, and she isn’t even tall enough to see over the nose; keeps pushing it down just to try and see where they’re going, and they lose about five hundred feet from that alone but her uncle just laughs, ruffles her hair and tells her she’s got all the makings of a real pilot.

The sun is blinding, and she’s got the permanent feel of going down a roller coaster in her stomach.

This is the first time she falls in love.

She spends the rest of the day in the library, looking up requirements and license and laws. She saves up: Christmas money, birthday money, chores in the stables, babysitting for the neighbour’s brats - anything she can get, she puts away carefully in her top drawer between her underwear and her socks, where she knows her brothers won’t try and get at it.

She’s got enough to pay for ground school by the time she turns sixteen. She’s the youngest in her class, the lone girl in a class half-full of thrill-seeking boys and half-full of men who want a license to so they can dust their crops.

“Sure you’re in the right place, girlie?” one of them asks. She doesn’t know how to respond, goes back to her notes instead, tries to ignore how he mock-whispers to his friends that she’s probably just trying to impress some guy she knows.

Ground school is her only good subject. Sure, she passes everything else, but nothing calls to her at school, and when the guidance counselors ask her what she wants to do when she grows up all she can say is _I want to fly_.

 _(That’s nice and all honey,_ they say back, _but we mean a real job - something you can do for the rest of your life._ She just shrugs. Doesn’t mention ground school. Doesn’t talk about the textbooks in her bag or the carefully written up notes or all the practice tests tucked into a plain binder, with much more care than she treats her school papers.)

She gets top marks in ground school, and the looks the boys give her turn from the lingering ones that focus on her hair and her chest to glares, angry that she’s taking something from them that they deserve.

(What she is taking from them, though, she’s not quite sure.

She’s also not quite sure why they think they deserve it in the first place anyway.)

And her hard work pays off. She wins a scholarship; spends her summer flying above all the crop fields. She falls in love all over again; once with her solo plane, a yellow boxy dinosaur with a crap glide ratio nicknamed Tugboat ‘cause of its registration, but the _best_ stability (she put it in a spin on a solo flight once and let go of the controls, just for kicks, and it practically recovered itself), and once with a boy who has brown hair and green eyes and who doesn’t treat her as a novelty but as a fellow pilot-in-training. Both don’t work out: her baby is dismantled after a fellow student bounces her three times, cracking the hull and damaging the truss enough that it has to be taken apart; and she breaks it off with the boy with green eyes like the fields on the ranch back home at the end of the summer. He makes her a bracelet before they both leave, though, yellow and blue like her plane and he ties it on tight enough that it won’t slip off.

She doesn’t remember his name, but she still wears the bracelet.

 

 

Jillian is eighteen and about to graduate high school and she still isn’t sure what she wants to do with her life.

No: that’s an utter lie. She knows exactly what she wants to do and it isn’t anything she’s going to accomplish with her feet on the ground, but she’s gotten into more than one fight with her parents about this and she isn’t stupid enough to keep bringing it up, not when she still lives under their roof.

Her friends all go off to university - Texas A&M, UT at Dallas, a far-flung few to colleges in New England and California and other such places. She stays at home and enrolls at the local community college; studying physics because she wasn’t sure what else to study and her parents sure seemed to think she was good enough at it to make something of it.

(That’s a lie - she’s not, or at least not at the kind they teach you in a classroom. She gets it on a level deeper than the mind - in her hands on the controls and her feet on the rudder pedals, but this isn’t knowledge you can exactly explain. Her physics teacher thought it was great, this girl so interested in the physics of flight, and that is probably the entirely reason why she’s here sitting in a classroom at a tiny desk instead of in the air.)

But as it turns out, Jillian Pearlman is in no way meant to be a college girl. One semester is more than enough for her. There’s one last big, giant screaming fight with her parents over her future, and then a few days later, two days after she turns nineteen, she walks into the Air Force recruiting office.

She’s packing later that night, throwing the few essentials she’s got the space to take into a military surplus duffle bag, when her mom knocks on the door.

“What’s up?” Jillian asks. It’s such a terribly casual greeting and she should be saying something more meaningful when she’s about to leave for boot camp in less than twelve hours, but she can’t think of anything at the moment.

“Your father and I wanted to give you these,” she says, and she hands Jillian one of those fancy velvet-lined boxes jewelry and things come in. She drops the t-shirt she’s holding on the pile of clothes already on the bed, and opens it. There’s a pair of earrings inside, and she knows just by looking at them they’re Standards-approved: plain pearl studs, no more than 3mm across in diameter.

“A late birthday gift,” her mom says. “Think of it as a reminder of your family,” and Jillian still doesn’t have the right damn words for this situation so she just hugs her instead, and she is determined not to regret anything about this choice, but this is coming close to breaking that promise, even if she won’t admit that to herself.

 

 

She loses her first name when she signs up with the air force, practically straight out of high school: the only thing she’s sure of in life at that time is that she wants to fly and so she does, but she’s stripped of everything identifying her except for a pair of rank slip-ons, the pearl studs her mother gave her when she left ( _Don’t forget where you came from, Jillian Pearlman_ ) and a thick Texan accent that feels so damn out of place on Edwards AFB. She earns it all back, though - claws her way up and gets her officer’s commission and she has never been happier in her life. The stripes on her epaulettes feel heavy on her shoulders. So do the eyes she knows are on her back all the time.

She knows the rumours, knows the guilty looks guys get when you’ve just caught them gossiping about you behind your back, knows that people have been saying that she’s slept with one of the brass (or all of them depending on who you ask); that she was just the token captain, the token pilot, the one female they had to take to make it look like they’re taking a stab at equality.

She is insecure about it for all of two days. Then their simulation scores come back and she takes vindictive glee in rubbing hers in everyone’s faces; plays up the country girl too while she’s at it.

“What,” she drawls, “y’all just angry ya got beaten by some backwater ranch girl from the middle’a Texas?”

The whispers start coming with admiration and awe now; acknowledging nods in the hallways and inclusion in all their damn boys’ club slumber parties. They start treating her better after that - like an actual person, one of ‘the guys’, instead of just some strange foreign alien with long hair that she’s supposed to keep gelled up and out of the way.

(She lets it blow loose instead.)

They’re all on the flightline one day, just screwing around and she’s tying up her hair and reaching for her cap, the one she’s had since her first solo, with her date and time and airport and runway and solo song all written on the underside of the brim in permanent marker, but it’s out of her reach. She glares at the guy who has it just out of reach, one hand keeping her hair up while she holds out the other.

“Give it back, Sellers,” she says, and it’s not threatening even though Shane knows she can be, except he still doesn’t and instead someone places a cowboy hat - terribly tacky and so obviously from one of those dumbass tourist traps - in her hand instead. She stares at it, acutely aware of everyone staring at _her_ , and - oh what the hell. She puts it on, doesn’t finish tying her hair up; just lets it hang loose, and hops into the cockpit.

She keeps the hat; gets the name Cowgirl with it, and she doesn’t sing during that flight because she sure as hell is not a newbie anymore, but she does writes the time and date and airport and runway of the first flight in it on the inside of the crown.

(She also makes sure to get back at Shane for that stunt earlier. He still isn’t sure how his mattress ended up on top of the bathroom stalls, perfectly folded hospital corners and all, and she sure as hell ain’t telling.)

 

 

 **2**. Jillian practically _jumps_ at the chance to pilot the X-2020 - it’s a gorgeous goddamn plane, and the specs are outta this world if she’s reading them right. And she ain’t gonna tell anyone, but she’s secretly flattered that General Stone’s asked _her_ \- not anyone else, but Jillian I-don’t-even-have-a-college-degree Pearlman.

Take-off is routine by now, nothing exciting compared to what she’s gonna get the plane to do next. It’s when she really starts pushing it that it starts getting fun - throttle open, flaps closed, nose pointed just below the horizon and she guns it, keeps the plane going even as she starts really feeling the G’s pressing her back into her chair. She takes a breath, nudges her up just a notch and watches as her instruments tick just past Mach 6.8—

—and then there’s a crack, and that’s never a good thing to hear when you’re thousands of feet above the ground, and there’s a voice in her ear telling her to eject she’s losing the wing captain pearlman please get out of there _now_ but she’s not even listening, her focus has tunneled to her and the sky and the instruments in front of her.

(She had to do an emergency landing once when she was first starting out - engine cut out on her when she was climbing. Jillian didn’t even think, just turned left and glided down to one of the fields beneath with her nose on the horizon. Landed the plane between the hay bales, too. She’s just that good.)

And she knows how to handle this, can handle it, brings the nose back up and keeps her speed under control and she is not scared, she knows how to do this, even as the controls flutter underneath her hands—

until all of a sudden they stop and the cockpit is overtaken by a wash of green.

 _Would you look at that_ , she thinks. Of all the things she was expecting - a miraculous recovery, having to eject and parachute out at flight level 180, a violent and fiery death - Green Lantern keeping her plane up and guiding her to the ground was most definitely not one of them. The landing he makes is beautiful, too: not just a straight up-down hover like maybe some would have done, no - he brings the plane in along the runway, nose up just as if it he’s inside landing it, the plane touching down front-gear first and the tail setting down gently a couple seconds later.

Jillian knows a pilot when she sees one.

“Thanks for the save, superhero,” she says, pulling her flight helmet off as she jumps out of the cockpit, and _oh_ the look on his face when he sees how her hair falls out and down her back was almost worth the plane itself. The smirk he pulls on his face after he gets his wits back about him is a familiar one, one that she’s seen on plenty of guys’ faces before. His is not the first and it definitely will not be the last one either.

“You would’ve blown past Mach 7 if you kept the wing,” he says, and yep, she so called it - pilot through and through, fancy space suit or not.

“They say the X-2020’s gonna do ten by the time we’re done,” she tells him in return. Probably shouldn’t be - confidential military material and all, but what the hell. It’s nice to talk shop sometimes. Pilots before hoes, and all that.

“Sorry I had to intervene,” Green Lantern says, hands on his hips, appraising - of both her and the plane and frankly she isn’t sure which one he’s looking at more right now.

“Funny,” she says, “y’don’t look so sorry,” and it’s true, and he knows it too and he grins and she likes that smile despite herself. “Captain Jillian Pearlman,” she says - not like the stripes on her shoulders and the name stitched on her breast just above her wings aren’t enough, but men like to be told these kinds of things. “They call me Cowgirl. You’re Green Lantern, right? Thought you were dead.”

“I’m getting that a lot,” he says, the cocky asshole. She pokes him in the chest in lieu of a response. He feels very, very real.

 

 

Alright, so on a scale from one to ten she really was _not_ expecting her plane to be made out of alien tech stolen from dead alien bodies. The fact that Jillian even believes it is pretty damn ridiculous all on its own, but after Green Lantern pulls out his magic rainbow club membership ring and he talks at it and it talks right back _at_ him she’s pretty sure she’s justified in believing anything that happens at this point in time.

She’s aware of a tingling in her fingers as she leans in over him as he examines the engine, and while she’s no engineer even she can tell this stuff is new. New and shiny and highly dangerous, and if she were a different kind of person she’d actually be kind of worried about the fact that they’d sent her to test the X-2020, not with this many things wrong with it. She’s still not, though. Not at all.

Other things to think about. Like: “why is the green on your uniform hot, and the black cold?’

“It’s not fabric,” he retorts - and it is such a typical response that Jillian can’t help but roll her eyes.

General Stone steps in then, dismisses her with a pointed suggestion that maybe she should get herself checked out at MIR, but like hell she’s gonna let him get rid of her that fast. “I’d like to know what I was flying, _General_ ,” she says, doesn’t call him sir on purpose. He blows her off, blows off Green Lantern too even though he’s technically got more jurisdiction than Stone.

She goes to the hospital then, even though she’s perfectly fine, because he could probably ground her in all of five seconds if he found out she skipped out.

The next day she’s in Stone’s office, trying to convince him that she really is fine and medical says so as well, and she does manage after a lot of fast-talking and a lot of steamrolling right over his protests. She’s just leaving, reminds his secretary that she really is good to fly, as she bumps into some one. She has to look quite up to see his face, and she’s not exactly short either.

“My fault, Jordan,” she says, as he tries to apologize. He’s all surprised that she knows his name and she laughs. “First off, it’s on your jacket,” she says, tapping a finger on the embroidered name tag, “but I’ve heard things ‘bout you, _Highball_.”

“Oh?” he asks, raising an eyebrow. “Anything good?”

“Depends on if you’re really as good as they say you are,” she answers. “You’d better be, though,” she adds. “I’ve been missin’ something round here.”

“Yeah?” Jordan asks, grinning. “What’s that?”

“Competition,” she says, and brushes past him.

And okay, so she was totally grandstanding there, but hell: she’s heard the stories about him. They all have, mostly from Shane, about the guy who played poker with him while in the air; the guy who gave up everything to fly and then gave up all _that_ later with one punch to Stone’s face. (She secretly thinks Stone probably deserved it, but she’s not gonna tell anyone that. Stone is still her boss, after all.)

Shane - Rocket-man - is one of the best pilots she knows, and she knows plenty of ‘em. There’s a reason why he’s being considered for transfer to NASA. So when Shane says someone’s good…then they’re damn good.

And she knows she’s good too, but the thing with being a girl in aviation is that you always feel like you’ve got something to prove because at the beginning, when you’re just starting out, everyone treats you like you’re not good enough to be there. And it becomes habit: one-upping people when you can, clinging to the place you’ve earned because if you slack off someone’s gonna take it from you. Jillian loves her job, wouldn’t trade it for anything, but she hates how much people treat it like a dick-measuring contest.

But talk is talk - she’s not gonna think too much about Jordan until he actually starts flying with them.

 

 

The X-2020 is dismantled, put back in storage and tied up in bureaucratic red tape. From what she’s heard, the USAF wants to keep their hands on it, but Green Lantern is telling them no way in hell, especially not after what happened with the Manhunter attack.

(She’s still mourning for the Raptor Lantern busted up in the air. The spoilers were a little sticky and the stick was crazy sensitive, but hell, she still loved it.)

Jordan does start flying with them - and oh, is he _good_. He’s one of the few that can keep up with her in the air when they’re set doing dual exercises, and for all that he’s a reckless _idiot_ , he does know where his limits - and the plane’s - are. They’re just not in the same place that everyone else thinks they should be.

And they become friends - she offers to buy him a round at Pacho’s after work one day and he’s actually a pretty nice guy behind all the brash assholeness. She flirts and he flirts back but that’s all that’s ever going to happen, and they both know that. She’s not interested and he’s got too much baggage, mostly going by the name of Carol Ferris. (Oh yeah, she’s heard those stories too.)

“Isn’t it high time you started lookin’ for a husband?” her mother asks one day, over the phone, and she’s too busy basking in the familiar comfort of another Texan accent to even think about the question for a second. Or two. Or thirty.

“Oh come on,” she protests. “I got a plane - what the hell else do I need a guy for?”

 

 

 **3**. She’s been shot - well, not her personally, but her plane and it might as well be her because she’s going down into the snow and ice and it’s too damn bright, and she can’t see the trees and she has never been so scared in her life; has to clench her hands just to keep them from shaking too badly as she makes her mayday call. She has to wait; nearly steps on Rocket-man’s own mayday, stutters over her call sign and registration and god that hasn’t happened in fucking years.

It wasn’t supposed to be like this, not at all - she’s supposed to be a test pilot but what can you do when you’re asked to target a terrorist group because the forces are short on skilled pilots? So she went, along with Highball and Rocket-man, and the next thing she knows she’s going down and the plane’s going up in flames around her.

She hasn’t heard anything from Hal yet, and that in itself is equally as terrifying because the thought of going home and having to leave someone behind, a very real concept right now, makes her blood run cold like nothing else.

She manages a landing, in the basest sense of the word; rolls out of the cockpit and into the melting slush and closes her eyes against the smoke, coughing uncontrollably.

She opens them again to a gun in her face, and this just went from bad to FUBAR.

They’re talking in Russian, and she doesn’t understand a single word they say but she’s fluent enough in body language to know when they’re talking to her. The gun waving in her face helps some. Well, ‘helps.’

“Captain, Pearlman J. Two-three-three-five-one-eight-five,” she says in return, raising her hands above her head slowly. It’s a phrase she’s practiced so many times in her head and hoped against all hope that she’d never have to say in real life. Hearing the words in her own voice makes this all the more real and she suddenly wants to cry; has to blink back tears.

Angry Russian man #1 waves the gun in her face again. She still doesn’t know what he’s saying. “Captain, Pearlman J.,” she repeats, but she’s knocked out before she can get any farther.

 

 

Jillian wakes up alone (bad), wrists chained (also bad), but fully clothed, and hell she’ll take what small miracles she can get right now. She’s still shock, she figures, ‘cause she’s not feeling much pain or anything else, but she can already feel a bruise forming on her temple.

Her hands are chained behind her back but they aren’t tied to anything so she stands, maneuvering them around to the front by stepping through the circle of her arms and now she has no idea what to do so she sits down, tries to breath slowly and tries not to cry. Neither really work out for her but it’s still a valiant effort.

It’s about fifteen minutes until she can finally stop it with the sobs, and she knows she’s gotten her damn eyeliner smudged (and it’s ridiculous that she even cares about it at this point in time), and when she wipes underneath her eyes the way all girls do and guys don’t understand, her fingers come away black. She wipes them on the cuff of her flight suit, which is blessedly warm and insulated (because goddamn does it get cold at flight level 500) and sits up straighter just that tiny little bit. It helps, some.

Her cell door opens, an ominous growl of steel bars across concrete and it’s a disgusting sound and they are, she decides, looking at them appraisingly, disgusting people and this is a disgusting place so it all matches and at least they all deserve each other.

Well. No, it’s not okay, because she’s not stupid and she knows she’s going to get the shit beaten outta her or waterboarded or whatever it is they do to prisoners or war, and the apprehension itself is enough to make her want to throw up and everything start hurting and she can barely breathe, barely walk when they drag her up by her hair and then shove her forwards, past empty cells, and she finds her breath then, starts swearing up a damn storm, insults them and their dicks and their mothers and everything else she can think of. She tries not to look at the empty cells too hard, but oh god is that blood it looks new what if it’s Shane’s what if it’s _Hal_ ’s - but then she’s shoved into a tiny room with water stains and one bare light bulb; they’ve really pulled out all the stops for her; and the big guy looms over her all threatening-like and she braces herself for a punch in the face, one in the gut, anything, but all he does is yell at her, a mix of Russian and English, and all she does is repeat the same thing over and over back to him.

She’s lucky. This time.

 

 

They don’t even bother dragging her out of her cell the next time, just stand around her kicking the shit out of her while she curls into a ball and tries not to cry too loudly, because hell - she’s taking boots to the kidneys and all that, and she _dares_ any one to be where she is right now and not cry.

One lone guy comes in afterwards, tidies up the cuts on her face and splints her finger, and wants to laugh at how painfully obvious their good cop-bad cop routine is. She doesn’t say anything to him, just grits her teeth as he sets her pinky back into place and he tells her that things would be much easier on her if she just cooperated.

She laughs at him then, hopes he doesn’t notice how close it was to sobbing, and tells him that he can go fuck himself. Or better yet, go fuck everyone else. He leaves without another word. She doesn’t see him again.

 

 

They never waterboard her. She’s grateful for that - except when they rip out the nail on her index finger with a pair of pliers, which hurts more than anything she can ever imagine and she wishes she was anywhere; back on base, back at home, back in the air, anywhere but here in this damn cell with these fucking guys who won’t let up, and she screams and screams and she doesn’t even care that they’re looking at her with something like satisfaction. The skin on her finger feels loose, like her hand doesn’t fit her bones anymore, and she wants to bring it in and cradle it gently but she can’t because of the way her hands have been cuffed.

They’re leading her back to her cell when a blood-curdling scream echoes through the hallways, and her guard covers his ears with his free hand and an annoyed look, but she nearly collapses in relief because that means that at least one of them is _alive_ and that’s more than she could’ve hoped for because it means that she’s not alone and right now that means the absolute world to her.

 

 

She wakes up once to some asshole goon straddling her hips, trailing one hand across her face while the other reaches for the zip on her flight suit. She doesn’t even stop to think as he tries to slide his finger in her mouth, just bites down as hard as she can.

(You can bite off your pinky finger with about as much force as it takes to bite a carrot, but your brain won’t let you.

Your brain, however, says nothing about biting other people’s fingers.)

The guy roars, jerking his hand away and she spits his finger out as she brings a knee up into his crotch from behind, kicks him off and scrambles into the back corner of her shitty bed, hands up in defense.

He gets up, glaring, and shouts something that probably translates to “you giant fucking bitch” but sounds even more intimidating in Russian, before picking up his finger with his good hand (and oh, isn’t that a fucking laugh) and stalking out. She wipes her mouth on the cuffs of her sleeves. By now they’re dirty, from her blood and god knows what else. She tries not to look at them too much.

They move her after that, waking her up in the middle of the night - or, well, when she’s asleep anyway; her internal clock has been shot to all hell - and dragging her further into the damn camp. Someone is screaming, over and over, and the screams are only getting louder and she starts shouting back at them, fighting as much as she can, in part so they don’t think they can knock her around too much when they’re moving her but mostly to drown out the goddamn _screams_.

The cells she’s passing are all empty still, except for one and her eyes slide over it briefly before snapping back despite herself because good fucking lord it’s Hal, and he whispers her name - _Jillian_ , not Captain or Pearlman or Cowgirl.

You get used to people calling you by your last name when in the military, lose any attachment to your first name you might have had, but this is the happiest she’s ever been to hear someone say her given name in years.

She reaches out, and their fingers brush for about all of a second before she’s pulled away, one of the assholes tugging on her hair sharply.

She hears a crack as she’s dragged away and she knows from experience it’s the sound of fingers breaking.

 

 

They dump her in another cell. It looks the exact same as her last one.

She isn’t bothered for a few days, and her thoughts are only interrupted once or twice by the guy who gives her food and water. She eats mechanically, avoiding the side of her mouth with the missing molars, and it tastes horrible, but honestly, she’s had worse at mess halls.

Her hair’s getting longer, and isn’t that funny? Even while it feels like everything should be freezing in time, life keeps going and her nails keep growing, long and ragged (except for the missing index one which has been hurting like a bitch as it grows back in) and her hair is longer than it’s ever been, past her waist and limp and dull and lifeless. There are always strands falling out every time she runs her fingers through; a poor substitute for a brush.

Hair grows an average of half an inch per month and so by her count they’ve been here for almost three. It feels like too long and too short an estimate at the same time; like every day they’ve been here has been more like a week but also like she can’t believe that it’s only taken three months to screw them all up this much.

They send an honest to god entourage for her the next day, dragging her out of bed without ceremony. She has no idea where they’re taking her this time: another cell, another room with another bare light bulb, out back to be shot or drowned or stuffed in a fridge - they’re all possibilities.

Where they do take her, though, is Hal’s cell, which was not really on her list of possibilities. “When I break her,” Angry Leader says as she’s dragged in, the accent heavy on his vowels, “you will break,” and she yells Hal’s name, tries to tell him not to tell anything, not to worry about her ‘cause she’ll be fine, but she doesn’t have the chance because then he punches her in the chest, knocks the wind right outta her lungs and he’s all over her with fists and boots in seconds.

They tell her later that Hal finally broke his chains and jumped on the guy attacking her, smashed his head against the wall until his skull cracked and then grabbed his gun, but she doesn’t notice anything until a shot rings out and hits one of the guys holding her back in the shoulder.

She takes that guy’s gun, holding it two-handed and runs, Hal right behind her. He puts an arm around her shoulders, even though she can see that his fingers are broken and he can’t even hold the damn thing properly, and they dash through the hallways even as her chest burns from getting winded, looking for Rocket-man. Hal says he’s alive, that the screams she heard earlier that day were from him and she believes him because anything else would hurt even more.

They find him, slumped in a chair with one leg sticking out in a completely unnatural angle; take out the goons surrounding him with too many messy shots but hell - she’s just gotten the shit kicked out of her and Hal has broken fingers, they’re allowed to make mistakes.

They cut Shane free but he can’t walk - twice broken leg, and he’s barely even conscious from the pain so they lash together a makeshift stretcher. They’re both too weak and too injured to even think of carrying it properly so they tie him to it and drag it outside into the snow. It’s blizzarding outside. “It’ll cover our tracks,” Hal says, and Jillian just nods; she’s too exhausted to think too hard and just concentrates on walking.

The rest of the trip is a blur. She doesn’t really remember the two days of walking through the snow, or finding the mountain climbers’ camp, or being airlifted to Germany, or even the pain of getting her fingers reset while en route in the hospital, and only later, when she’s lying in bed with nothing but the calm, steady drip of an IV to keep her company, does she finally go about remembering what it felt like to shoot someone in the head, and then go about trying her best to block it all out.

 

 

 **4**. She lost two teeth. They give her new ones, along with a shiny P.O.W. medal that they pin right above her heart. General Stone’s terribly careful about pinning it on - they always are when they’re giving awards to females (when she got her first wings they’d literally just stuck it to Velcro stapled onto their shirts at wings parade to avoid any sticky situations) but even so it takes all her willpower and then some to keep from flinching.

Her hair’s freshly cut, right to where it was before this entire mess happened, and pinned up underneath her wedge. She grips harder on to the chain links in her left hand. Her face hurts from smiling. “First round’s on me,” she says to Hal and Shane, and they nod, fingers just as white-knuckled, because they’re the only ones who really understand how she feels. 

They ask her to go _back_ to Chechnya, and she would be confused and disgusted except for the fact that this is the US Air Force so she’s not surprised at all. ‘A huge service’, they say, ‘just this one last mission’, they say, ‘authorized leave after – as long as you want,’ they say, and in the end she says yes, but not because of any damn excuse they can come up with.

In the end, she goes for herself. She can’t quite explain it, doesn’t even bother trying to unpack it for the brass-assigned psychologist she’s _supposed_ to be seeing, but it’s her way of trying to get over it, trying to erase what happened there and if that happens to be in a way that involves blowing up whatever remnants of that godforsaken camp, then so be it.

They send her with Sugarsnap and Whims. Neither of them have the experience she does but they’ve got solid records and if she can’t have Highball and Rocket-man at her back, well, this is more than adequate. Sugarsnap’s from Lousiana, tall and dark-skinned, with an accent that nearly rivals her own and his grandmother makes the best cookies around – he shared them once. It’s how he got the name. As for Whims, well. They don’t really talk about how he got his so much as laugh about it still behind his back.

        

 

It mostly goes to plan, which has basically been the story of her fucking life recently, and one moment everything’s just fine and the next she’s freefalling, doing everything she can to keep the plane in a normal (and oh, when has that standard changed) crash landing attitude and not a spiral dive straight into the mountain side. She barely has time to call out a mayday, let alone three and her call sign and registration before her radio cuts out, something she attributes to the flame she just saw along the left side of her plane.

 It’s official. Chechnya is the ninth circle of hell.

Some sort of miracle happens and she makes it out of the plane, alive and relatively unharmed. Her hair’s on fire and isn’t that just a fucking treat but her tumble into the snow puts it out. It smells horrid. She doesn’t think about it.

 There’s a gunshot, just to her seven o’clock and she whirls and it’s one of the nameless goons from _before_ , one whom she’d gladly wipe off the face of the damn earth if she could (and tried – but look where that got her). They all look the same but her eyes dart to his hands and the gun in them and there’s a very telltale gap on his left where his pinky should be. She feels a spike of pride even though nobody ever could say she’s got any sort of advantage in this situation.

“Hey,” she says casually, voice projecting even through the storm that’s starting to build. “How’s the hand?”

He glances down, on sheer instinct. She sees the exact moment it clicks and then she _runs._

 _Sign up for the air force_ , they said. _Flight and adventures,_ they said. _It’ll be fun_ , they said, and maybe for the most part they were right but right now is the furthest from fun she can possibly imagine in her life. Fuck the movies – dodging bullets is never worth it.

And Jillian’s just cocky and brash enough to think that she won’t get it, that she’ll never get hit; how good can a nine-fingered guy’s aim be in the middle of a goddamn blizzard; and that’s obviously when one goes whizzing by her damn cheek, nearly splintering the tree right in front of her.

But she knows she can’t keep it up forever. It’s cold and her boots are filling with snow, and she’s never been the kind of person to have a compass in her head (‘ _you boys can keep one there_ ,’ she used to say, ‘ _but me, I’ve got more important things to store_ ’), but even if she did it would be absolutely no use: the sky is unremittingly gray, and the snow just keeps coming harder. She’s running out of time, but she can only keep going because she’s got no other damn options left.

Then she trips. She doesn’t mean to; nobody ever means to, not when they’re running for their life, but the ground is treacherous and slippery and she falls flat on her ass with possibly the most undignified scream she’s ever made in her life, and while she could maybe recover from that and get back up on her feet, there’s a loud crack, so loud she almost thinks it’s another gunshot, just next to her head, until she realizes the ice is breaking underneath her: a frozen lake, hidden underneath the mountains of snow that never seem to melt, cracking under her weight and just ready to swallow her in.

(And wouldn’t that be ironic? She always used to joke that she wasn’t made to be on land, never felt at home unless she was in the air, and now she’s going to die underwater. Yeah, it’s not exactly on land, but it wasn’t exactly the death she was looking for either.

Not that she was looking for death. She’s still got a lot ahead of her. This wasn’t in her plans.)

And if Chechnya was cold, then this lake is freezing beyond compare, chilling her straight to the bones, and she’s so cold she can’t even think of moving, can barely _breathe_ it hurts so damn much. 

She doesn’t want it to end like this. Would never have wanted it to end like this, at least without a fight, and she tries but her fingers won’t even cooperate, and the most she can do is just keep her mouth shut and try not to breath in.  Involuntary apnea, they call it, the refusal to take a breath when you’re drowning, not until the very last second. Funny what you remember when you’re about to die. And it hurts, it hurts like hell, but she tells herself she’s been through worse and she’s light-headed enough that she might even believe it.

And she’s also light-headed enough that when she hears it, she’s sure as hell she’s hallucinating and this is just one step closer to dying.

“Captain Jillian ‘Cowgirl’ Pearlman located,” someone – something? – says, and it’s so clear that she can’t believe it’s not in her own head. She doesn’t get her hopes up, resolutely refuses to look towards the light shining right in her face; closes her eyes and resigns herself to the worst.

 

 

And the next thing she knows is Green fucking Lantern dragging her out of the water. He leaves the goon to soldiers made out of green light, holds her close like she’s precious cargo and flies them both out of there.

She can feel the ring scanning her vitals on his command – it’s odd, like a chill going up her spine except instead it being cold it’s warm, so damn warm. The green on his uniform burns as hot as ever and she curls in closer, tries to thaw her bones out; barely hears what he has to say as he sets her down (on a construct hospital bed, complete with doctor, of all things. Go figure).

“You’re going to be safe, miss. I’m going to take you home,” Lantern says, and it doesn’t sound reassuring at all. It sounds like an apology, and she’s heard that tone of voice before. Heard it every single time she’s talked to Highball since they came home. It still hurts to hear.

“Hal?” she asks, even though she knows she doesn’t need to.

And his face crumples, his shoulders drop; she can feel the guilt rolling off him in waves thicker than the light he shines out. “I’m so sorry,” he says, repeats it even as she reaches a shaky hand up to the curve of his cheek, even as he grabs on like she’ll disappear if he doesn’t.

“You don’t have to be,” Jillian tells him. And it’s true. She’s not angry, not at him; not at all.

He looks at her like he doesn’t believe her, and somehow, that’s the thing about this all that hurts the most.

 

 

 **5**. Jillian spends entirely too much time in a hospital bed. By the time she’s cleared for active duty again, it’s summer, and the entire big fiasco that was Chechnya seems like a lifetime ago. And that’s the way she prefers it, thank you very much. She'd be more than happy to never be cold ever again.

Hal gets all shy during her absence – it’d be kind of cute, if he were an eight year old schoolboy, but he’s not anywhere near that so she takes him out for drinks one evening, the sun still up, teasing and coaxing until he finally opens back up again.

And he still feels guilty about it all. He never really stopped by to visit when she was stuck in the hospital, or when he was she was too hopped up on the good drugs to really say anything of meaning (and if he were any other kind of person she’d totally think he planned it on purpose) so she hasn’t had the chance to really talk to him about this, but:

“You didn’t shoot our planes down, Highball,” she says. “You didn’t lock us in those cells. Y’just like living without a safety net, and that ain’t a crime.” He still looks disbelieving. “I’d be the same,” she admits, even as she takes a drink, “and I gotta admit, I’m pretty jealous.”

He relaxes then, just a bit, and she laughs and he smiles and it’s already miles better than the stiff awkwardness they had before. “You and I are probably too alike, don’t you think?” he asks.

“Oh, come on,” she says, playful. “You’re not supposed to be scared of anything. Don’t tell me you’re scared of me, super-hero?”

He grins, then, the full-blown smile that probably got him candy as a kid and probably got him tons of ass when he was making his way through the ranks. “Maybe just a little,” he says. It sounds like a promise.

 

 

And that’s obviously the moment when some crazed lady scantily clad in hot pink (and she would never be caught dead in that colour, but that’s just her) busts a wall, breaks a few tables, spills her damn drink and then molests Hal, all in the same breath. She’s one of Hal’s exes, apparently, but she’s also possessed by some crazy space rock so Jillian won’t hold it against her. Or him. This time.

Before she can blink Hal’s suited up, in emerald green instead of olive drab and he’s flying off, yelling the last bits of his quick debrief. (She’d feel kind of stood up if she wouldn’t have done the same thing. Hasn’t done the same thing, so many times, cutting off a conversation in favour of hopping in a plane and taking off.)

 

 

And then the next thing she knows is _pink._ Hal tells her later that the space rock decided to go after her, for some unknown damn reason, but all she really remembers is feeling kind of nauseous – partially from the searing shade of magenta but mostly from the disgusting feeling of being _used_ , of being reduced just to a sack of flesh with nice curves and nothing else besides that. It’s gross and she feels totally used after it’s all over.

 

 

And honestly, the entire night’s just a giant bust. After the attack of the pink highlighters came the dreaded conversation with the ex-girlfriend and the Looks and the Words Between the Lines, and she feels like she’s intruding even though Carol’s the one who leaves first. It’s not a nice feeling, not at all. 

“What are you doing Saturday night?” Hal asks, though, and she grins.

Not a total loss after all.

 

 

 **6**. Green Lantern going missing isn’t a big deal - he’s an intergalactic space cop; he’s always flying off to some planet or another. Space Sector 2814 is a large one, and even with everyone else’s help Hal still has a lot of ground to cover.

But one day Green Lantern goes missing and she goes about her business as usual and makes excuses to Shane and doesn’t worry because Hal does this all the damn time, and then the next thing she knows the Justice League is reporting his death.

Meanwhile, Captain Hal ‘Highball’ Jordan is reported missing in action, despite the fact that after Chechnya and Chechnya 2.0 none of them had ever been sent out on active duty again. Test flights only, they’d insisted, and Stone had been only more than happy to agree. Shane’s suspicious - of course he is, he was right there with them; he knows Hal shouldn’t have been anywhere other than on Edwards AFB, but Stone makes up some bullshit about a super secret covert op that they needed Hal’s specific skill set for and it placates him and everyone else.

She knows differently, though, knows that he died in green and black instead of Air Force blue.

She doesn’t know which one she would’ve preferred.

 

 

There’s a funeral, military, twenty one gun salute and all that. She tears up every time she has to hear one, no matter who it is, but she doesn’t tell anyone that. They hand over the flag to his little brother - and god, isn’t that a kick in the face, outliving your entire family - and an empty coffin is lowered into the ground.

She hates everything about funerals - hates wearing dress uniform, hates the stupid heels that are standard issue for all female officers, hates putting her hair up and gelling it back until it’s literally a helmet on her damn head. And she especially hates that she has to watch as yet someone else she knows is buried just for doing what they loved.

All she ever wanted to do was fly. She knows Hal was the same way, even as he took on the responsibility of Green Lantern.

 _But Hal’s come back before_ , she tells herself, even as she wipes away tears. (She’s not supposed to be. They’re standing at attention – chin up, hands by your sides, no unnecessary movements allowed, but nobody has the heart to chastise her for it.) _He’ll pull it off again this time._

Jillian knows she’s lying to herself.

 

 

She’s out on the airfield, looking up at the great hulking monster that is an F-22, towering up way above her head. She trained on a Cessna 172, got her glider wings on a SGS 2-33A - they both seemed large at the time but compared to a Raptor they’re tiny; an infant next to Nikola Zigic.

She doesn’t even hear it at first, not until she hears her own name and then she turns, looking for the source, doesn’t see anything except for a flash of familiar green and her breath catches in her throat for a second until she realizes that the size is all wrong, it’s too small for how close it is, and-

“ _Jillian Pearlman of Earth,_ ” something says, like all the voices of all seven billion people on Earth layered on top of each other, male and female and human and not, all at the same time, “ _you have been chosen_.”

She doesn’t ask for what. She knows there’s only one thing something like this means.

“ _You have the ability to overcome great fear,_ ” the voice - voices - say. “ _Do you accept this burden_?”

There’s only one thing she can say.

“Oh _hell_ yes,” she answers, and watches as the ring slides on to her finger, a perfect fit, green and black sweeping over her, and for the first time in her life she takes off without needing a plane to do so.

 

 

“ _Extraterrestrial disturbance within 200 nautical miles,”_ the ring says, and god she is never going to get used to that voice. It didn’t sound like that when she was listening in on Hal talking with his ring - oh god, his ring, it’s the one sitting on her finger right now, isn’t it, and that’s some place she doesn’t want to go at all - and she wonders if it’s an owners-only sort of thing.

“Take me there,” she says anyway, “but give me the crash course on this thing en route, okay?”

She can cheat a bit - she’s seen Hal fight, seen the things he’s imagined up to use in every kind of situation possible. She knows the ring can protect her from the cold and from the heat and even from someone shooting a bullet right at her head, but there’s a difference between watching and trying to learn and _doing_ and trying to learn. _You’ll never learn to fly sitting behind a desk_ , one of her instructors had told them once. _You gotta get out there and take the controls._

She figures this is her taking the controls.

The ring tells her the rest of its limits - no lethal force, but she’s okay with that, still has nightmares about the gun in her hands and doesn’t really feel like adding any more. What’s more important is what she _can_ do - anything she can imagine, and goddamn doesn’t that sound like a kid’s dream come true?

She practices for the brief time she has on the rest of the way, following the green flight path that the ring traces out for her until it stops.

Jillian’d been afraid that maybe she wouldn’t be able to see this ‘extraterrestrial disturbance’ the ring had mentioned when she got there. She was, thankfully, mistaken: it’s about as obvious a disturbance as you can get, some giant hulking thing with a lot of eyes and even more tentacles ripping up the streets and trying to do the same to the pedestrians.

She takes a breath, holds it, and then lets loose, a giant green horse coming and trampling right over the damn thing in the street. Its hooves leave giant craters behind (and she’ll have to apologize to the city for that, won’t she), and a few of the tentacles burst when they’re stepped on, gushing gross space-alien blood everywhere, and all of its eyes turn to look at her where she’s floating in the air, glowing greener than any traffic light.

“You are in violation of law number four-five-six-nine-zero,” she says, repeating what the ring is telling her to in her ear. “Cease and desist immediately.” Despite everything - the stares, the threat of possible imminent death, she finds herself relaxing into the orders. She’s a captain. She’s done this before.

The tentacle monster growls something that the ring translates approximately into “go to hell, foul mud monkey!” and lashes a tentacle out at her. She grabs it in a giant green hand, before pulling the thing up by the tentacle and then slamming it back down into the ground. It leaves another crater and she winces mentally at the damages the city’s gonna have to pay for. Hopefully that doesn’t come out of her intergalactic paycheck. Does she even get a paycheck?

The thing doesn’t seem to be getting back up again, and the ring prompts her to cage the thing so she does, weaving green bars of light up and around and underneath the thing, levitating it away from the street. She ties a bow on top just for the hell of it.

It’s magical what the ring can do - it really is just literally thinking about things and seeing them come to life, and she’s a little scared by the prospect - she’s seen Hal’s constructs, knows what he’s capable do and she doesn’t know if she’s up to that creative stretch of thinking yet. The ring’s still talking in her ear though, interrupting her train of thought, telling her to take the thing back to Oa.

“And I would,” Jillian mutters, “if I knew where the damn place was. Your space directions don’t really make much sense to me, y’know.”

The ring says something else but she’s not evening listening because there’s more green in her vision, someone else in the same uniform as her flying into view. She knows this face.

Kyle Rayner: she’s seen Hal talk to him more than once, even if he doesn’t know her.

He looks surprised to see her. In his defense, she’d probably be as well - she didn’t think about the possibility that Hal’s ring would go to someone else, not until it appeared two feet from her face. “I can take it from here,” he says, gesturing to the tentacle monster she’s got floating behind her, bow and all. She’s more than happy to hand it off to him this time, even if it is just him being distrustful of a new Earth Green Lantern and of her and her abilities; and that’s normally something she wouldn’t let slide but right now she doesn’t even care.

“Thanks,” she says, and he just nods and flies away before she even finishes.

She glances down at the destruction the tentacle thing left, figures she doesn’t want to deal with it, and flies away as well.

 

 

She doesn’t go back to Edwards AFB. She flies home to Abilene instead, and the trip takes her all of about five minutes instead of what it normally would take . She doesn’t even knock at the door of her parents’ ranch, just soars over the house and to one of the back pastures, perching on one of the fences before she finally lets the green and black go.

“Hey,” she says, and the ring immediately knows she’s talking to it and not to herself or anything because she can feel it come to - to life would be the best description, even if it isn’t entirely accurate - on her finger, even if it doesn’t say anything to her first. “How’d he die?” she asks. _You were his,_ she doesn’t add, _you were there with him until the end, you saw what happened, you could’ve done something, couldn’t you_?

The ring is silent for a second. “ _Playing the final recorded moments of Green Lantern 2814.1_ ,” it says, and the scene isn’t small like some handheld projector, which somehow makes it worse - it’s spread out across the field, washing out the fences dividing the paddocks by the sheer brightness of its light.

She watches the whole thing despite herself, needs to know how he died, needs to know what happened to him and what could happen to her someday. She’s seen the consequences, knows the risks - hell, even a brief stint as a Star Sapphire was disgusting as all hell. But this is different somehow, not just because it’s a legacy, but because - it’s a challenge. And Jillian Pearlman has never been one to back down.

“End playback,” she says, and the ring shuts down, just like that. She’s not crying, definitely not crying; nope, never mind, she’s crying full out right now, large, hacking sobs that she can barely breathe around, can barely stay sitting up straight against. She wants to curl inwards, sob into her arms, but she doesn’t let herself give in to the urge, just braces herself against it all until she can finally relax from all the crying. She feels tired, empty, but oddly calm, like something foreign and dangerous has been washed out.

 Jillian wipes her eyes, lets the green and black sweep over her again. 

The skies are blue, not a hint of cloud in sight, and the sun’s shining full force. It’s a beautiful day to be flying.

“ _In brightest day_ ,” she whispers to herself, just before taking off.

She’s got work to do.

 

**fin.**

 

**Author's Note:**

> Oh man. Thanks so much for reading, you guys! Cowgirl's one of my favourite DC characters - because let's face it, us pilots gotta stick together, and if you guys grew to like her just even the tiniest bit more then my job here is done.


End file.
